Major Labels Say Limewire Owes $75 Trillion In Damages – Judge Says: “Absurd” [CHART]
The major labels have demanded damages ranging from $400 billion to $75 trillion from Limewire. A federal court judge has since deemed that amount to be "absurd" and contrary to copyright laws. "If plaintiffs were able to pursue a statutory damage theory predicated on the number of direct infringers per work, defendants' damages could reach into the trillions," judge Kimba Wood wrote. "As defendants note, plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is 'more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877."
She concluded that the labels should be limited to one damage award per work, which will be decided by the number of works that can be shown to be infringing.
How much is $75 trillion?
(via HotHardware)
hey Kyle…thanks for posting this. It’s pretty funny. It’s like the labels are being run by a bunch of nonsensical kids.
makes sense to me. 1 dollar for each one of my 75 trillion illegal limewire downloads.
go world
Ridiculous on many levels, and yet artists every day choose to let these knuckleheads run their business for them.
Crazy.
the attorneys of course get their 24.7 trillion dollars first. Then the parent companies, then the stockholders, then the labels, then the execs, then the decorators and so on until the artists can decide to sue in a class action suit only to discover that they are still in fact recoupable.
was there really 75 trillion downloads? If that’s the case then it seems entirely reasonable, even though they won’t get it. I never understand the label bashing on this page. Big labels often put out disposable pop but they also have helped alot of great rock bands.
Major labels are just embarrassing themselves.
The burden of proof on each one of the 75 trillion limewire downloads is on the record company. If they can prove that EVERY download on limewire was a pirated song, then they should be entitled to the 75 trillion dollars. However, they have to prove that the song that was downloaded was only downloaded by each individual person 1 time (same song multiple times wont matter) and that it was actually a song that they hold the copyright to.
Because you can actually have 20 seconds of a song for whatever reason covered under public use (and still label the song as whatever you want), at 75 trillion downloads they would have to check them resulting in 47.5 Million Years of Work time in order to prove their claim.
Well, according to the logic, every person in the world must have downloaded 10854 songs each.